Peel School District — located in Ontario, Canada, and bordering Toronto — is reportedly weeding books from its libraries with publication dates prior to 2008. The district’s school board has yet to respond specifically to parents’ and Ontario officials’ questions, raising concerns about the book-weeding’s effect on the students’ educations and the district’s approach to education in general.

Reine Takata, a 10th-grade student at the Peel district’s Erindale Secondary School, told the Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC), “This year, I came into my school library, and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.”

Takata snapped photos of the library that showed what she and her classmates say are far fewer books than last year, with newly emptied-out shelves and only books published in 2008 or later remaining. Reportedly missing titles include Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Harry Potter series, books on the history of wartime detainment camps in Canada, and many more. 

Several students, including Takata, speak in a video about the removal of books. Takata adds:

No one asked for our opinions on what to remove and what not to remove. What books were considered racist or out of date. And I think, as students, we should decide what books we can and cannot read. I think that authors who wrote about Japanese internment camps are going to be erased, and the entire events that went on historically for Japanese Canadians are going to be removed.

One of the video’s unnamed students explains:

I want to go to law school, I want to get into a good university. I know there are lots of other students like me. So my biggest concern is that these books, since we don’t know what is being removed, these books could be educational and they could be helpful and benefit me and others in doing well in school, and since they’re gone now we don’t have those sources.

A third student worries:

I’m just wondering whose decision — who gets to say? Does the community get to be informed about this? Like … I’m not in favor of censorship, so who gets to say to do this, and who chooses what?

Parents and Teachers Criticize the School Board

Teachers have responded by communicating their chagrin about last summer’s new book-weeding process to parents — which encouraged Tom Ellard, parent of a Peel student, to found Libraries Not Landfills, an organization whose members include retired teachers, parents, and community members, according to the CBC.

“Who’s the arbiter of what’s the right material to go in the library, and who’s the arbiter of what’s wrong in our libraries? That’s unclear,” Ellard said.

He explained that, even after talking to the school board trustee, his son’s principal, and the parent council, “[i]t’s not clear to the teachers who’ve provided us this material, and it’s not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer.” (READ MORE: Harvard’s Stupidly Obvious Affirmative-Action Fix)

The board issued a general statement responding to the community’s concerns, stating that “[t]he Peel District School Board works to ensure that the books available in our school libraries are culturally responsive, relevant, inclusive, and reflective of the diversity of our school communities and the broader society.”

As word of the emptying library volumes reached parents and the Ontario Education Ministry, Education Minister Stephen Lecce said:

Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities…. It is offensive, illogical, and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada’s history, anti-Semitism, or celebrated literary classics.

Why the 2008 Book-Weeding Cut-off?

Inside Peel School District, a more comprehensive issue may be at hand concerning school officials’ designs.

Sociologist Ruth Milkman of CUNY writes that a “post-2008 wave of protest” marked a “new political generation,” citing policy changes in economic intervention, immigration, sexuality, and race stemming from that year. Milkman’s academic assertion seems to align with the cut-off date for books at Peel School District.

Indeed, the historical shifts of 2008 include the predictable crisis of subprime mortgage loans collapsing the ill-conceived TARP program, when governments bailed out corporations in a set of unprecedented actions but sold it through the media as though it were normal for the government to casually exercise the power to decide economic winners and losers. The Dodd–Frank Act formalized increased central control of the economy, and further “stress tests” were implemented by which the feds, by emergency rule, could deem entities “too big to fail.” Concurrently, just as social media was beginning to be ubiquitous, Occupy Wall Street promptly exploded onto the 2008 street scene and engaged a generation in the protests. (READ MORE: Parents Face Off Against Extremely Gay Curriculum)

As if in concert — and fresh off public-relations tours for the unsubstantiated documentary An Inconvenient Truth — the media pushed for Al Gore to run for president in 2008. The coverage expediently granted him a major speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention, in which he promoted the agenda of a carbon-dioxide panic that continues to escalate today, despite plants requiring the life-giving gas to grow. 

By its end, 2008 was, of course, the year Barack Obama rose meteorically to the presidency, riding months of spectacles. In the same year, Justin Trudeau first assumed Canadian office. 

Careful analysis shows, however, that the mechanisms of this “wave” of movements were not grassroots and organic but agendas planted with a tremendous inflow of money from the ultra-rich. Even now, under the Biden administration in the U.S. and Trudeau’s continuing centralization regime in Canada, an activist push for a leftward-lilting government continues to be seeded by tremendous sources of dark money. 

The citizenry of both countries has grown wise enough to see that socialist billionaires’ schemes to corrupt their governments are related to censorship and displacement of classical thought at government schools. 

Initiatives for “equity” (not equality) have a stronghold at the Peel School District — the school board is actively organizing anti-meritocracy social programs that it calls “student leadership” — yet students like Takada and her peers have a vested interest in the value of accessing pages printed from bygone eras. Young minds want to come to their own conclusions and beliefs through engaging with historical records. 

Entering the pivotal 2023–2024 school year with the election season growing closer and the reins of power hanging in the balance, the board’s political agendas and book-weeding intentions should pique students’ interest in their own learning. But if pre-2008 books go from school libraries to scrap in landfills, how will knowledge of the past be learned?

We live in an era when not only are books from before an ideological “wave” weeded out, but internet searches also automatically filter out historical and political content. When documentation from the past is purged, history can be misrepresented in any way deemed politic today. The good side, too often, is taught to have won every important battle. 

As Orwell aptly noted, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Michael Bedar’s writings have appeared in the Federalist, The American Spectator, Hollywood in Toto, Free the People, and American Thinker. He has written a novel, tinkers, raises his family, and works in documentary film.